as for chargers three arrangements three. three. three. three boards. for your media projects a free media gun to our teeth. hello i'm job market in washington d.c. and here is what's coming up tonight on the big picture and the surprise conversations and great minds new york times bestselling author michelle goldberg joins me for the first half hour to talk about her latest book which focuses on the uphill battle for women through reproductive and other rights around the world meanwhile with only just a month to pass a deal on the debt ceiling in order for the president to stop acting like children or republicans compromise or to have

a truer motorists. birthrights conversations of great minds i'm joined by a bestselling award winning journalist and author whose work has appeared in numerous publications in rolling stone the nation and the los angeles times she has brought us stories from all over the world places like uganda iraq india her first book kingdom coming the rise of christian nationalism explore the rise of religious fundamentalism particularly within the republican party and a more recent book the means of reproduction sex power and the future of the world documents the fight for women's reproductive rights around the planet and that vocal on the j. anthony lucas work in progress or currently she is the senior contributing writer at the daily beast and newsweek it was to say she brings in the light and perspective to many of the issues we're tackling both at home and abroad today so

i'm pleased to welcome from our new york studios michelle goldberg michelle welcome to the program. thanks so much for having me thanks for joining us what motivated you or motivates you to do the work you do and take on the topics you. why don't i narrow it down i can tell you a little i've always been fascinated by religion and idiology you know i grew up in buffalo new york my first political experience was standing head of arm in arm outside of our city's abortion clinics which were targeted by operation rescue when i was in high school so that was a kind of very intense introduction of politics and also really satisfy anyone because at the end of the day you can basically declare victory you know people kind of physically kept the clinics open but it was also you know a very intense introduction to what religious fundamentalism really means

a little bit later one of the doctors these clinics i used to stand in front of a man named. was assassinated in his kitchen by an anti-abortion fanatic so i was always interested in these issues as an activist it was only natural for me when i became a writer that i would start exploring them in and in some sense trying to understand people who weighed only previously encountered as kind of opponents screaming across a police line in more space to finish please. i was was a bit more specifically what made me want to write this second book the means of reproduction is the fact that you know when i say that i wrote a book about religious fundamentalism in american politics kingdom coming everybody knows what i'm talking about whether or not they agree with my perspective whereas people don't even realize that there is

a global battle over reproductive rights and there you know people don't understand that in many ways our politics here in the extent to which we have politicians in power who respect and understand women's rights and having a profound impact not just on women here in the united states but on women all over the world and what i had the opportunity to do in this book was to try to trace you know kind of the lines between some of these seeming abstract abates either in congress or the united nations or some of these various summits that often seem to be kind of drowning in jargon and not really connected to anything in the real world. let's try to trace the connection between those things and if the real human drama is that are happening in cities and towns all over the planet we're finding right now around the united states women who let me back up a little bit laws that have been passed and the pretext of the laws was that if

a pregnant woman was assaulted by an evil man. and her and she lost her baby that that man should go to prison because the the fetus died and for example in south carolina some three hundred women have been prosecuted under this law one man has been prosecuted under this law and the women who are being prosecuted are being prosecuted for things like falling down the stairs or more often having miscarriages for which there is no actual known cause but that woman was taking drugs or that woman was engaged in some kind of risky behavior that the prosecutors are alleging led to is several women look at looking at life in prison for this. and not even engaging in risky behavior i mean one of the what's going on right now is that there was a move you know there's been a move throughout the last ten years or so to endow the fetus with as many legal rights as possible kind of as a precursor to outlawing abortion and so these fetal personhood or fetal protection

laws are very hard to for pro-choice people to challenge because again they are stenciling all about protecting pregnant women from violent attacks and you know who could possibly object to a law that says that if a pregnant woman is attacked by some violent lunatic he's not going to be in a prosecuted both for hurting her and endangering her pregnancy rate they seem like pro women laws on the surface and i think that what pro-choice activists and feminists worried about was that these were really just a way to kind of introduce or back door restrictions on abortion and that's exactly what we're seeing so first what happened is they were used against. some of the most kind of unsympathetic of defendants i don't mean person that it's neat to kind of defendants that are the least likely to have. public sympathy or at least likely

to have you know to be kind of seen kindly or and pathetically by a jury which are you know women who used drugs while they were pregnant or while their children were small. now they've actually expanded so there is one thing that i think people don't realize. and i know people don't realize because what i've written about it people have responded with a lot of shock is that there are within right now in the united states in prison on suspicion of trying to end their pregnancies illegally so although we certainly have it kind of gone back to a pre rover says wade era of mass back alley abortions back alley abortions unsafe abortions are happening in the united states right now women are being prosecuted for them so the first people to be prosecuted were these women who again had used drugs or they were pregnant but now it's moved on so that there's cases there's a case of a woman in indiana. who is facing homicide charges because she tried to kill

herself while she was pregnant and it ended up. leading to they think leading to the eighty's that after it was born there is a woman who is facing charges who's who's facing prison time because she i think she couldn't afford an abortion and so she went online and bought abortion pills online you know that's kind of the clearest example of the return of back alley abortions there are you know horrible cases all over the country they're usually women who are maybe slightly more on the margins of society you know they're not happening to middle class women and certainly not to middle class women in blue in kind of blue states where abortion axis is still somewhat guaranteed so we don't hear about them alive but. it's you know kind of things that feminists have been warning about for years and years and years and it always sounded maybe a little bit chicken little ish about are starting to happen michel of the catholic

church has been fairly out about being anti-abortion for several centuries i suppose. the protestant christians the seems like a more recent phenomena and politicizing it. in a partisan way is even more reason what is the thread that is tying all of these together both here in the united states and internationally which we here in the united states work what is animating this movement is who are the people behind it what are their real goals well yes you're absolutely right the protestant of untellable opposition to abortion as much as we now take for granted is a relatively new phenomenon you know when roe versus wade came down in one nine hundred seventy three there was tremendous catholic opposition and outrage but evan jellicoe as did the modern angelical movement was still in its infancy and there just wasn't that much outrage you know jerry falwell had

a few years earlier been chastising martin luther king for getting involved in politics you know there was still a sense that it wasn't for the church to involvement to involve itself in kind of worldly matters now what really you don't ramble bulmer who is a both in evansville call and a historian of until cool movement at columbia university has argued and i think correctly that what really awoke that kind of sleeping out angelical giant you know basically you had a huge evan jellicoe resurgence in this country in the one nine hundred seventy s. and in some ways it was part of the same spiritual upsurge they gave us you know lots of different facets of the counterculture of the new age movement some of those searchers became what they called ben jesus freaks or jesus people. so there was this movement that was kind of a little bit amorphous most of them were political you know most of the newly awakened until cols got very excited about the jimmy carter campaign including

include in that michele bachmann who worked for carter pat robertson who once said that he did everything you know everything he could without violating f.e.c. regulations to get carter elected but then in the late seventy's there was you know a huge back there was a growing backlash against the culture against the counterculture a growing desire to kind of create a conservative counter counterweight to kind of what was in some establishment liberalism. and there was also a lot of anger among calls about court rulings and i.r.s. regulations that removed the tax exempt status from some of the christian segregation academies that had opened in the south after brown versus board of education to kind of continue segregation under the guise of parochial school ng so you had all of these things coming together and then you had

a sense that abortion could really symbolize broader issues of kind of cultural breakdown of of women's emancipation or kind of. the end of the nuclear family in traditional gender roles one thing that's really interesting and you know reporting on this internationally said a lot of light sometimes on what's going on locally one thing i noticed internationally is that in countries where abortion and contraception were associated with kind of feminism or women's rights you know for example in india access to abortion was. access to safe abortion. what was was passed under the guise of population control you know or in iran for example family planning was a way for men to control the size of their family you know similarly in saudi arabia where you can buy but by the morning after pill over the counter in

countries where these things aren't associated with feminism they're hardly ever controversial it's only when it because when they become signs of broader social change that people get really up in arms about that so this isn't this isn't as much about abortion as it is about the war on women. i'm curious about what are your women in the war on madeira nitty epping ok you mentioned jimmy carter and even michele bachmann's support for jimmy carter why did the evangelical movement or why did the born again movement leave behind in the first born again president to go to support ronald reagan who was divorced and never went to church. well first of all they i mean he was but you know they certainly thought that he was one of them he spoke the that he spoke of the right i mean filthy language and you know one of the very useful things about evansville christianity from

a political perspective is that it's the ology of sin and redemption kind of allows you to wipe the slate clean if you have a lot of. you know if you have a past that you were not that's not particularly solace but again it was all about abortion and well it was about two things it was about abortion and again it was about the i.r.s. under jimmy carter and what and its removal of tax exempt status for the christian segregation academies but it the growing anti-abortion movement which really coalesced in the late seventy's and was catalyzed by a guy named francis schaefer who's a really important thinker in this world someone i think deserves to be a lot better understood. outside of culture he was an intellectual who kind of created both the underlying idiology of the anti-abortion movement you know saw abortion as not just an evil in itself but as

a symbol of kind of society's slide into barbarism and it's you know kind of turning its back on god's plan and it's inviting all kinds of terrible social disorder he also pioneered something that i think is crucial to understanding is certainly people like michele bachmann or mike huckabee but really important to understanding a lot of the modern writing and that's the idea of a biblical worldview which basically holds that all of reality is conditioned by your kind of theological starting it and so it says that you know if you believe for example in something like evolution it's only because you have the wrong worldview you're starting with the wrong premises and what this idea has done is it has kind of given this movement permission to create its and to create an entire alternative reality you know and so we're now living in it in a place where one of our two major political parties is dominated by people who

don't accept you know what we would consider fundamental precepts of reality you know kind of don't accept the enlightenment don't accept the scientific method you know have a kind of. entirely different a piston all it's me and in fact i'd like to delve into that more and and michele bachmann's involvement with that right after the break we'll have more with bestselling author michelle goldberg in just a moment. that's fine with twenty four seven live streaming news towns like to tell you about the ongoing financial hurricane unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you may never find on mainstream needs. to be. a political. person more aren't just.

for. fun. it's. all about you conversations and great minds i'm speaking with bestselling author michelle goldberg author of the award winning book the means of reproduction sex power and the future of the world which show i was in in minneapolis two weekends ago i guess it was for a net roots nation and spent a fair amount of time talking with a number of people who know michele bachmann and the bottom line that i took away

from that would which frankly surprised me at first was do not underestimate this woman she works very hard she's very personable but people who know her her like. even the people who disagree with her she is she has access to enormous amounts of money and perhaps most importantly she lives within this what you were just describing within this world or this bubble as it were here in the united states of ideology and key ology. can perhaps provide her a much more powerful. platform or or. elevator to to high office than even mitt romney's access to to the mormon network. news can you speak about what i think there's two parts to it i mean on the one hand certainly you have just her access to a huge army of foot soldiers and fundraisers and mean we've seen that in her kind

of fantastical fundraising prowess but maybe on a on a more subtle level and one of the things i think it's important to understand about her and her role within this movement and she comes out of this movement. more than any other candidate certainly more than any other candidate in the race and probably isn't as much as any candidate that we've ever seen any she is completely of this movement from the very beginning. and one reason again why i think it's useful to understand this idea of the christian worldview and to understand the kind of vast alternative reality that this movement has constructed is because it explains what might otherwise look like battling gaffes. on michele bachmann's part and it shows why the thing that i think is important to understand about michele bachmann that i heard again and again it during my reporting in minnesota was that she's not stupid you know she and i think we saw that during the

first to be people really surprised that she's not sarah pailin she doesn't fumble her words she's articulate she's eloquent when she makes. you know she doesn't it could be dramatic mistakes but they're they're not really random mistakes what they are is that basically they're kind of expressions of and any of the neology that so foreign to us that we sometimes have no idea which is talking about so for example you know one of her most celebrated gaffes recently well it was both the fact that she talked that she had talked earlier this year about how the founding fathers were adamantly opposed to slavery and worked tirelessly to end it and then just recently she went on i think was good morning america and and refuse to admit that she made a mistake she kind of stood by that and everybody laughed at her and i guess my point was that this wasn't just a random error. there's a whole kanin of revisionist history books you know history written from what

people call the chris called christian worldview designed to show that the united states was founded as a christian nation that it should be one again and busy idiology the past to contend with the fact that if the united states was really found is a christian nation then how do you end if it you know if it was founded if it had this kind of immaculate conception so to speak and that everything since then has been one long decline and that we. kind of return to this pre lap syrian world of the pounders how do you explain away slavery i mean slavery is a pretty big sign that the founders were not in fact you know we're pretty far from infallible and that there actually is such a thing as progress right that we don't want to kind of go back to the days immediately following the revolution and so one of the ways that they have explained that away is to both kind of exaggerate the founders opposition to slavery and then to argue in the case of

a guy named john i had samoan and john idle is important for understanding michele bachmann that the founders may have a post slavery but they knew that to free their slaves into into a world with no jobs for them into the economy of the time would have been cruel and so they needed to keep slaves to protect them which is a fairly astonishing argument but john i. make this argument is somebody that michele bachmann often cites as an important figure in her intellectual development and when she was a world roberts university which is you know a kind of costal bible based school in oklahoma where she specifically has said you know that she went to get a biblical world view on the law when she was there he was her professor and she was his research assistant she was his research assistant on a book called christianity in the constitution which argues that the united states

was intended to be a theocracy and should be again and make some of these arguments what the founding fathers and so. and my question is that these aren't random mistakes and when she makes these kind of mistakes and we all laugh and go far to a lot of her most devoted followers it sounds like we're the ones who don't know what we're talking about because they believe that she has access to this secret history that liberals have conspired to ignore cover up so she's in fact speaking to generation joshua for example you want to tell our viewers what generation joshua is and how this all fits together and how in a how was your get around was about you know separating politics from from story. well that's not the sum of big question and i think that one of the ways one of the and again i hate to be so dr about it but

a useful idea to understand regarding things like generations is the idea of dominionism which is also something that was associated in some respects with francis schaffer in the people around him it's basically the idea that christians have it's little more complicated innocence basically the idea that christians have a right and an obligation to rule in every aspect of society and so a lot of the early to new writers talked about how the goal of you know kind of political a gauge christians should be to make their way through the institute through all the institutions of american life and kind of christianize them you know so generation joshua was just one part of that was an initiative created by a guy named michael farris who's a very influential evangelical and one of the leaders in the homeschooling movement and the founder of patrick henry college which is

a college for homes mostly firm school live until students pediatrician joshua was basically that you know. the first generation of evansville cols you know say first generation of and all calls michael farris this generation of angelical zz was the moses generation right they led their people out of the. you know kind of tyranny of that's the spirit they've been led there they're people out of society that was under the tyranny of sections of secular humanism it's the duty of generations joshua to reclaim the promised land for christ and so you know there's been this kind of long march through the institutions you know which is in certain ways legitimate right i mean every kind of movement sees the way the way to change the way to change things in this country the way to take power is to you know get into congress make their way into the white house you know

take they've actually just been much better at organizing in a lot of ways than than for grassroots out you know they made a real multi-year not a decade effort to take over the republican party at the grassroots you know starting at the school board starting at the town council and you know going all the way up to the to the president and the and the people in the anti-gay issue has been used very aggressively by them. for example our reach into the black community . talked about and in fact all that helped george w. bush. get you know i don't talk means. well it certainly is part of michele bachmann. you know michele bachmann has built her career on anti-gay activism and she you know that was her signature issue when she was in the minnesota state house she has a record of actually fairly shocking statements on i'm gay people i mean anyone who's interested should go look up

a speech that she gave in two thousand and four to a group called ad watch stands for education watch in which she talks about you know kind of a homosexual conspiracy to infiltrate our culture or to teach homosexuality to small children in schools to recruit. at one point she mentions you know she goes on this litany of all these kind of gay people and in entertainment and what and why this is such a problem and she mentions melissa etheridge and then she mentions that melissa etheridge has breast cancer and that maybe this will be an opportunity to her for her to finally be open to spirituality i guess the implication being that this is like her great chance to give up on the sexuality be a this was central to her rise just as it's been central to indulge all politics. for the last decade although i think that the dynamics are really changing as it's no longer a wedge issue so much for the republicans increasingly you know as the majority of

americans come to support marriage equality it could potentially be a wedge issue for the democrats you know you wrote a great uproar about that in the daily beast going to going to have. yes and you know i think. it was entirely understandable i think for a candidate like obama or all the democratic candidates it would have been crazy for any of them to come out for marriage equality in two thousand and eight although i think that most of us can assume that they probably secretly do not believe that gay people should not be able to form families. but because this this issue has been so toxic and has been so central to kind of republican efforts consolidate power it was worth kind of staying away from things have really shifted in the last few years so that right now for the first time polls are showing that majority of very a small and a small majority but

a majority of americans support marriage equality large majorities of democrats supported and pretty strong majorities of independents supported the only people who buy a very very large margins oppose it are rank and file republicans although increasingly elite republicans and certainly republican donors who are motivated by the social conservatism support it so it could potentially be you know particularly if democrat like obama showed more leadership it could potentially be a way to drive a wedge between some of the funders on the right and the foot soldiers and even point out you know dick cheney's and favorite show goldberg thanks so much for being with us. out thanks so much for having me. after the break conservatives have assure more and brian darling and my fellow rosabel her community join me for our weekly robel. twenty four seven why.